The main benefit to that presence watcher with subscribers running ARS is for multi-site Cap+ systems so the packet data traffic can be sent to the site in question where the subscriber has registered and not tie up RF resources at other sites unnecessarily, but in conventional or IPSC it will necessarily be repeated everywhere anyway.
For a "tactical OTAP" configuration between a control station and subscribers within simplex range perhaps the only benefit to having presence would be when you queue up the entire fleet for a job that it won't be trying to talk to radios that aren't switched on or aren't in range. It will try to reach them and then fail over and over in the device monitor. But whatever, it's not like in simplex there's any real traffic prioritization or any concept of data revert to an alternate timeslot (unless you're trying to use DCDM, which is not a configuration I've ever tried because of its undesirable behaviour if 2 subscribers decide to elect themselves as timing master). Basically the takeaway is you'd prevent RM job processor from retrying periodically and keying up the control station radio until the subscriber radio itself registers using ARS. Also one of the issues with the ARS implementation in TRBO is that it doesn't de-register when you leave the ARS-enabled personality for another one, or a non-ARS personality. It only de-registers if you power down while selected on that personality, so you'd still end up with radios the watcher thinks are still online but have switched to different personalities, until the inactivity timeout.
Is the ARS on the subscribers set to register to the radio ID of the control station, and all that? Have you set up ARS watcher passively without running its built-in server role and having the DDMS bound to that port? Is it bound to the correct interface for the radio CAI and not the system's other network interfaces?
Is this a permanent configuration that is worth spending all this time on or would you eventually be using this in an infrastructure (repeater) environment where you can just use MNIS/NAI Data and avoid the control station?
